The question is purely academic. I am not having technical issues and I am NOT asking for technical support.
I understand that technically, my ISP had probably choked the previous port.
I also know that some nation states, organizations or other actors - such as ISPs - block Tor connections for whatever (political?) reasons.
What I don’t understand is what legal grounds they have to do this. I have read the Terms of Service. Twice. And there is nothing explicit about having specific ports blocked for whatever reason. It does say that they have the right to limit my bandwidth if they deem that my usage is impacting their other customers’ connection negatively. Perhaps they somehow force it into this paragraph? As in, according to them, running a Tor relay doesn’t count as “normal use”?
If you have any experience or knowledge on the matter, please advise. 😊
The question is purely academic. I am not having technical issues and I am NOT asking for technical support.
I have to say i have, in my whole life, never heard of an residential ISP blocking a single port (at least if you don’t live in china, russia or similarly run countries). If they have an issue with services you have running, they normally either contact you or disable the connection as a whole first and ask questions later. There are some shenanigans regarding traffic shaping tho (often used to annoy torrent users). Are you on a shared medium (a.k.a fiber to the curb)? In that case, if you generate loads of traffic, they might throttle - but in most cases not block - your connection, because it can cause an already overbooked line to generate issues in your local area; but this would persist even when changing ports.
What i have encountered more often are consumer level routers that don’t handle lots of connections at once well, causing them to freeze or drop traffic. My ISP provided cable modem / router (in my case in bridge mode so i can use my own router) freezes for a minute when starting torrents and not limiting the amount of connections created per second, and repeats the freezes every time the connection comes back and the torrent client continues to overload the router.
I believe I am sharing something with my neighborhood, since one company is responsible for all the fiber in this area, renting/leasing it out to various ISPs. My connection is being received and modulated with an ONT in my apartment (or in the basement, in which case all the eight residents/apartments share one ONT?). My subscription is 1 Gbps. I sure hope that even if the ONT is that huge whirring box in the cellar and not the quiet one in my apartment, they use industrial grade CAT8 or 7 cables to connect to the individual apartments… How else would the ISPs be able to deliver 1 Gpbs to all the residents simultaneously… 🤔 Anyway, my router is a Raspberry Pi 4B running OpenWrt.
I totally agree and that is also what I expect: if they have a problem with my usage, I’m sure they’ll contact me and kill or nerf the whole connection, not a single port…
My ISP uses fiber to local substations and then uses the cable network (copper-based) for providing service in the apartments - currently they are able to push 2Gbps down / 100Mbps up using these old-ass coaxial cables and in a densely populated area, which is pretty impressive if taking into account that the city started building that network in a public/private partnership, and originally just used for TV (even getting an upstream in those networks was pretty tricky IIRC and wasn’t viable in the beginning) in the late 80s - my first connection from them was 300kbps, and that was blazing fast for the time!
If it’s traffic shaping, you might try to find out. I looked around, and you can either try using wireshark to see if something fishy is going on, or you might try https://github.com/marcelscode/glasnost , but that tool is pretty old and i don’t know how reliable it is nowadays. At least it’s java based, so it should run anyways.
Edit: I just saw you mentioned that you were just using 20Mbps. There’s no way that has any impact even when on a shared medium for other users in you area, so that theory can be canned.
Nonetheless, this is a great opportunity for me to read up on traffic shaping! Thanks!
And, wow, 2 Gbps down on a coaxial? Sick! Maybe that’s all the bandwidth freed up from people not watching cable television anymore? 🤣